New Delhi - More than a third of the world's hungry people live in India and the figure may rise amid the global economic crisis, news reports and officials said Friday, which is designated as the World Food Day by the United Nations. Around 35 per cent of India's population - 350 million people - are malnourished and do not know where their next meal will come from, the NDTV network reported citing UN's World Food Programme data.
The WFP estimates that there are a little more than 1 billion "urgently hungry" people with inadequate access to food.
The number of hungry people, which represents around one sixth of humanity, has increased by 100 million over the last year, the UN food agency said.
Meanwhile, a study by ActionAid has criticized India, revealing that 47 per cent of the country's children under the age of six were malnourished, the IANS news agency reported.
India stood at the 22nd spot among a list of 51 countries. "It is the role of the state and not the level of wealth that determines progress on hunger," Anne Jellema, ActionAid's international policy director was quoted by the IANS as saying.
Around 70 per cent of India's children consume less than 50 per cent of the micronutrients they are supposed to consume, the NDTV report said.
This deprivation, made worse by economic recession, would mean a healthy future lost forever for an entire generation.
"Even those marginally better nourished, will be pushed into the undernourished bracket because of the economic recession. That is a major concern," B Sesikeran, Director of India's National Institute of Nutrition told the news channel.
Despite its rapid-economic growth, India presents a stark contrast.
While the country ranked amongst the first three developing countries on the indicator for social protection, because of poor implementation over 30 million Indians have joined the ranks of the hungry since the mid-1990s, the Actionaid study revealed.
"The dark side of India's economic growth has been that the excluded social groups have been further marginalised, compounding their hunger, malnutrition and even leading to starvation deaths," Babu Matthew, country director for ActionAid India told IANS.
The report praised Brazil and China for their efforts on ending hunger. According to the report, China has been able to cut numbers of its hungry people by 58 million in 10 years through strong state support for small farmers.
The ActionAid report said that India has some of the best legislation for social protection amongst the developing nations on nutrition, free school meals, employment guarantee and food subsidy for the poor and pension for vulnerable groups.
But the implementation of laws and food schemes is poor, rendering these programmes futile for the common man.
Entitlements have to be delivered by empowering communities and with the government displaying greater political will to end the widespread hunger in the country.
